Isabel Mohan reviews How to Paint a Queen, a special culture show
edition in which Alastair Sooke explored the depiction of female rulers.

People aren’t just writing songs for the Queen – they’re also painting pictures of her. She is essentially the nation’s grandmother, so the whole nation wants to show off their homework to her and hope that she’ll pin it on the fridge and give them a biscuit.

In How to Paint a Queen: a Culture Show Special (BBC Two), Telegraph art critic Alastair Sooke looked back at portraits of not just Elizabeth II, but many female monarchs before her.

Painting a queen is harder than painting a king, it seems, because many of the qualities we somehow associate with power (big noses, jowels, facial hair – this is probably all Henry VIII’s fault) aren’t entirely feminine. Those who painted Queen Victoria also had to deal with the fact that their subject was, well, rather old.

But when Queen Elizabeth II sat for Lucien Freud in 2001, he didn’t worry about flattering her – and, as Sooke observed, the resulting controversial portrait made her look “burly” and “like a granny with a perm”.

Going too far the other way has mixed results too – colourful prints by modern artists like Andy Warhol and Gerhard Richter mean that the Queen’s image now pops up on the walls of many homes as well as in art galleries, much to the distaste of devoted royalists who find these glossy prints two-dimensional, and prefer more traditional styles.